The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2015, and October 31, 2016 (see FAQ for exceptions), are automatically nominated for the 2016 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on November 3, 2016, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

KIRKUS REVIEW

Belcher takes a break from occult Westerns (Shotgun Arcana,
2014, etc.) with this blood-soaked contemporary urban fantasy featuring a gray-hat
protagonist cut from the mold of John Constantine and Sandman Slim.

Laytham Ballard’s granny intended him
to be a Wisdom, a magic user who draws strength from his unity with nature and
employs it to help and heal. But his great abilities led him to darker places,
toward painful bargains with some unsavory entities and the use of his power
for less noble purposes. Boj, an old friend and partner in crime, asks Ballard
to fulfill his dying wish: to go after Dusan Slorzack, a magically gifted
Serbian war criminal who murdered Boj's wife years ago. But Slorzack has
vanished utterly, and the path to revenge is littered with corpses, old and new
enemies, dangerous deities, and a previously unknown source of magic. The
tough, ethically dubious magician/detective/grifter is a popular trope, but
Belcher takes it to depths that readers may not have encountered before. Ballard
is an incredibly ruthless, vicious operator who doesn’t hesitate to use the few
people who still care about him. Protagonists of this sort often destroy
innocent bystanders by accident, but Ballard will deliberately use innocent
bystanders as a shield or scapegoat to escape during a crisis. He feels
guilty, even tormented, about such acts (or at least, that’s what he tells us),
but that doesn’t stop him from committing them over and over again. As he
explains, Ballard has literally bargained away pieces of his soul, with
visceral consequences that most authors aren’t brave enough to
show. There’s evidence that there may still be some good in him, but it
certainly struggles to surface most of the time.

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